


A Teenage Vampire Love Story

by narceus



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, F/F, F/M, M/M, Teenage Drama, Vampires, immortal teenagers, which is so much more dramatic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-24
Updated: 2016-09-24
Packaged: 2018-08-16 23:41:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 24
Words: 18,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8122132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/narceus/pseuds/narceus
Summary: Not quite an entire alphabet of snippets in the lives and unlives of the teenagers of Beacon Hills.
Being five thousand years old doesn't mean you've had five thousand years to grow up.  It just means you've got four thousand, nine hundred and eighty-three years of practice of being seventeen.





	1. Apple

**Author's Note:**

> Some time ago (like a year?), I watched all the Twilight movies in one weekend and then started writing alinear snippets out of a Teen Wolf vampire AU. As y’do.
> 
> The original plan was to have 26 scenes, one for each letter of the alphabet, alinear but loosely connected in such a way that would sketch the outline of a story. I got to about 23 before I completely ran out of steam, and I’m not actually sure what order these ought to go in. Alphabetical seems as good as any other.
> 
> A cross-post from my tumblr.  
> More detailed warnings at the end.

**Apple**

“Where are we going, though?” Scott asks.  It’s a brilliantly sunny Saturday morning, no lacrosse practice, so Stiles is pretty much guaranteed to be at home asleep in the basement.  Scott’s free, he’s just not sure why Derek chose now of all times to just… _hang out_.

“We’re here,” Derek says.  The Camero slides neatly into the parallel parking spot, and Scott waits while Derek feeds quarters into the meter.  It’s a weirdly and kind of disturbingly adult sight, but then, Derek is an actual adult, more or less.  Scott stares up at the banner on the other side of the street.

“Here?” he asks.   _Pine Valley Farmer’s Market_.  “Really?”

“Really,” Derek says, slapping one hand between Scott’s shoulder blades and propelling him towards the entrance.

The market is bustling, dozens of people and almost as many dogs.  Scott gets distracted scratching behind the ears of an incredibly inquisitive cocker spaniel; when he looks up, Derek is deep in conversation with a cheese vendor.  About–Scott takes half a step closer to listen–raw milk gouda.

“I didn’t expect this,” Scott admits after they walk away.  Derek has three packages of organic, homemade cheese in the reusable bag he apparently brought from home, and Scott’s world is tilting wildly on its axis.  “Do you come here every week?”

“They move inside in the winter,” Derek says.  He reaches into his bag and pulls out an apple he must have bought while Scott was busy with the German Shepherd.  “Catch.”

The apple is huge, red and yellow, a couple of brown spots marring its skin.  “Thanks?” Scott says, still a little bit baffled.

“When you have a heightened sense of smell and taste, preservatives can be unpleasant,” Derek explains.  “And organic farming’s better for the environment, which is better for us in the long run.”

Is this what Derek’s like when he’s not afraid for someone in his pack or in pain?  He’s almost smiling.  It’s an unexpectedly good look on him.

Scott bites into the apple.  Sweet, tart, and shockingly juicy, so that Scott has to hurriedly wipe at the corner of his mouth so he doesn’t look like a five-year-old with a snack.  “That’s a really good apple,” he says after he swallows.

“Honeycrisp,” Derek says.  “Not a lot of people grow them around here.”

“Did you bring me here to talk about varieties of apples?” Scott asks.  Maybe Derek does do this every single Saturday, shopping for himself or the rest of the pack, but he definitely doesn’t usually bring Scott with.

“All of this, Scott,” Derek says.  “This is your world.  This is where you belong.”

“At the farmer’s market?” Scott asks, playing up the confusion because he’s got a sudden, leaden suspicion that he knows exactly what this is about.

“In daylight,” Derek says.  “Alive.”

“That’s not your business,” Scott says coldly.  He knew it.

“You’re not like them, Scott,” Derek says.  “How often do you think they get to stroll around in broad daylight like this?  You think if Stiles were here, if Lydia was here, they’d be looking at the _vegetables_ for dinner?  Do you think Allison would?”

“No,” Scott admits.  Of course they wouldn’t.  He knows that.

“Whatever they’re offering you, you don’t want it,” Derek says.  “If you really want to be faster and stronger, I can give you that.  Without selling your soul.”

“Are you serious?” Scott blurts out.  He hadn’t been expecting…that.  “You want me to be a werewolf?”

“You’re a friend to the pack, Scott,” Derek says.  “We’d be honored to have you.”

Scott can barely even wrap his head around it.  Six months ago he knew exactly who he was.  He was human, the completely normal human surrounded by every kind of supernatural creature, just doing the job in front of him that somebody has to do.  Now Stiles wants him to be a vampire and Derek wants him to be a werewolf, and meanwhile he’s got college applications due in two weeks.   _How is this his life_?


	2. Beginnings (a question, take one)

**Beginnings (a question, take one)**

She tries to leave his clothes in his locker, surreptitiously, when nobody else is around.  Not really surreptitiously enough.  If Allison had really been trying, she wouldn’t have gotten caught.

“Hey, thanks!” Scott says, his face lighting up like a sunrise when he sees the paper bag in her hand.  Stiles isn’t here, for once.  Small mercies.  “Did you get home okay?”

Scott McCall, the boy who keeps agrimony in his bedroom and rose hips and mustard seeds in his gym locker.  He knows how to bleed silver poisoning out of a werewolf, but he still hasn’t figured out what his best friend is or does at night while he’s casting magic on all those supernatural wounds.  Scott McCall, who lends his own clothes to a vampire and then worries whether she got home okay.

“Yeah,” Allison says, with a smile she means too much.  “Thanks.”

“Derek’s okay,” Scott says.  “That’s who you saved, Derek Hale.  We’re kind of friends, so I explained what happened when he woke up.  He had to rest for a while, but he’s totally fine.”

She hadn’t asked for a name.  She hadn’t wanted a name.  The wolf was a beast, an animal, a careful enemy.  A mistake.  Allison didn’t need to know more than that.

What kind of high school student becomes ‘kind of friends’ with a full-grown werewolf?  Scott McCall, apparently.  Allison wonders why it seems like that’s going to start being the answer to a lot of questions very soon.

“I didn’t save him, I almost killed him,” Allison reminds Scott, shifting from foot to foot.  She’s still holding the bag of his clothes.  She’d only meant to leave it and go.

“Not on purpose,” Scott says earnestly.  “Derek understands.  I explained it to him.  He’s not mad.”

God.  Scott _explained_.  Allison can just about picture it.  Why does she have the terrifying suspicion that Scott might even have been able to do it?

She kind of needs to know everything there is to know about Scott McCall.

“Thanks,” she says.  Maybe, if Derek decides to hold off on retribution for a while, she won’t need to tell her parents at all.  Maybe.  

“Can I ask you something?” Scott asks.  “Why did you bring him to me?  You could have just left him there to die and nobody would have known it was you, but as soon as you realized he was a werewolf…”

Oh no.  Oh no, Scott thinks…ugh, _humans_.  It all changed in the eighties, didn’t it?  The eighties or nineties, before Scott was even born.  Fucking Anne Rice.  Scott thinks she’s _good_.

If Allison were like Lydia, she’d say something about, oh, sucking the lifeblood from an innocent virgin later that night, just to make sure Scott remembers she’s dangerous.  Allison had hunted a deer last night, after the debacle with Der–with _the wolf–_ because it was easier than finding human prey at one in the morning in the middle of a rainstorm.  She’s not really like Lydia at all.

“It would have started a war,” Allison says, which is true enough in its own way.  “His pack against my family.  Enlightened self-interest.”


	3. Crux

**Crux**

“Just know I’m watching you, Scott McCall,” she says, and Scott blinks, because this feels like the end of a conversation he hasn’t been here for so far.  He looks left and right, but the lacrosse field is deserted and dark.  Allison was up in the bleachers earlier, but she left with her dad, and everyone else is heading off to Danny’s party or still in the locker room.  So why is Lydia Martin standing in front of him, on the wooded edge between the field and the parking lot?  “Understood?”

“No?”  Scott didn’t even play tonight.  Why is the most popular girl in school watching _him_ , instead of, of…well, Danny is gay, but Isaac and Boyd are both hot and star players, and Isaac’s single, right?  The werewolf thing might matter to some girls, but Lydia couldn’t possibly know about that anyway.  “Because of Allison?”  He’s not really clear on how that friendship works, since Allison doesn’t always look exactly happy when she’s talking about Lydia, but it’s Lydia Martin.  The school’s learned not to question her too much.

Lydia rolls her eyes harder than Scott knew was humanly possible.  “Yes, because of Allison.  And because of Stiles.  Who else is eating out of the palm of your hand lately in spite of the fact that Scott McCall is a tremendously ordinary human teenage boy whose only apparent redeeming value is the ability to open a book on herbalism once in a while?”  Wait, what?

“You know about that?” Scott asks, eyes wide.  Stiles couldn’t have told her, right?  He wouldn’t.

“Everybody knows about that, Scott,” Lydia says.  “Every witch, werewolf, wendigo, and wandering spirit in a 500-mile radius.  And somehow you’ve managed to attract the attention of two people I actually find myself caring about.  For certain values of ‘caring’.”  Wait, if she knows about Scott, does that mean she knows about Allison?  “So tell me, what is so special about Scott McCall?” she asks, pressing hard fingertips into his chest.

“I don’t know,” Scott admits.  “I really don’t.”  Allison held his hand all day yesterday.  He has no idea what she sees in him.

“Vampires fall at your feet,” Lydia says, so _shit_ , she does know about Allison.  Does Allison know Lydia has her secret?  “Both of them.  They’ll spend hours in the sun, pass up chances to eat, make peace with werewolves, for you.”   _Both?_  “So what I want to know is,” Lydia says, “why shouldn’t I just show up at Scott McCall’s window some dark night, or find him alone in the woods someday, and take matters into my own hands?”

“What?” Scott asks, somehow even more bewildered than before.  And suddenly very aware that they are, more or less, all alone right next to the woods.  “Lydia, I don’t know what you want from me.”

“I want to know if my life gets easier or harder if I just turn you right now,” Lydia says.  “I could give two people exactly what they want, rather than leaving them both with a reason to hang around this dead-end town until you grow up and they finally come running back to me anyway.”  She touches his cheek.  Her hand is cold.  “Or maybe I just want you out of the way so they’ll go back to being mine.”

“They?”  Scott finds his voice somewhere, too high-pitched and scratchy.  Allison had said there were other vampires…

“Hmm.  Don’t flatter yourself too much.  Stiles has been mine for over four hundred years,” Lydia says, what, _what_ , _WHAT_?  “You’ll survive another seventy if you’re lucky.  But I like Allison.  And I like to give gifts to the people I like.”


	4. Draw

**Draw**

The thing about sunshine is, it feels so _good_.  It’s warm, and Stiles’ skin doesn’t register a lot of things as warm these days.  Blood and sun and fire.  Blood, sun, fire, and Scott McCall’s _goddamn_ _smile_.

“You want to come over and work on Chemistry together?” Scott offers, like there’s a chance in hell that Stiles is going to say no.  “My mom’s working late shift again, but we’ve got a ton of leftover barbecue chicken in the fridge.”

Sun.  It’s so warm at first, and then it keeps feeling warm, not just on your skin but right through you, all the way down to your insides.  So warm, filling you up even better than blood, more and more until you could burst.

Stiles swings an arm around Scott’s shoulders.  “I’m hearing ‘work on Chemistry’, but what I think you’re really saying is ‘play Halo until our eyes are about to fall out of their sockets, and then scribble random letters and numbers on a sheet of notebook paper and call it homework.”

Scott shoves him, and Stiles shoves back, careful, careful not to break the human, _careful_.

And then you do burst, of course, explode into dust from the inside out, and you’ve got only yourself to blame.  Too much sun’ll get you every time.

Scott mostly sits on the bench for lacrosse, so Stiles does too.  No, that’s not right.  They decided when they moved here two years ago, it was better to split the student body between them, so Lydia was going to be the popularity queen and Stiles was going to be the dorky nobody who knew all the other dorky nobodies.  So he joined lacrosse, stumbled over his own two feet, and stayed on the bench.  The fact that Scott sits there too is irrelevant.  Immaterial.

The fact that Stiles is going over to Scott’s house again instead of hanging out with literally any of those hundred other dorky nobodies, that’s because of sunshine.

It’s hard to get coherent reports, obviously, but as far as Stiles can tell, before you explode, sunshine does things to a vampire’s head.  Gets in there first, interferes with whatever magic substitutes for neurotransmitters.  Makes you do stupid shit like stay standing out in the sunshine, letting it pour into you, more and more.

“How about we _don’t_ get detention from Mr. Harris again this week?” Scott says, grin broad and kind and bright enough to hurt.


	5. Eternity (Lydia's Lore Lecture Hour: Lifespan)

**Eternity (Lydia’s Lore Lecture Hour: Lifespan)**

“Don’t do that while you’re driving.”  It’s the first thing Lydia’s said in the past quiet half-hour.  She’s been resting her head against the window, gazing silently at the slow seep of dawn bleeding gray over the landscape.  They might just make it back to Beacon Hills in time for first period.

Stiles glances down at the phone in his hand, guilty, and then back up at the empty road.  “I was just–”

“Scott will survive without you for two more hours,” Lydia says.  There’s no way she could see the screen from over there, not when she’s still staring out the window.  Stiles scowls and jams the phone into the cup holder.

“What am I going to do, crash the jeep?” he asks.  “We’re immortal.”

“We’re not,” Lydia says.  She doesn’t sound like she wants to start an argument, and she hasn’t lifted her head.

“Well we’re not going to die in a car crash because I was texting and driving,” Stiles grumbles anyway, for the form of it.

“No,” Lydia agrees.  “But we’re not immortal.  You know that.”

“And yet, so long as we manage to avoid pissing off an even older vampire than you or getting staked through the heart by an overzealous hunter while we’re sleeping, I think we’re going to be okay,” Stiles says.

“Not forever,” Lydia says.  Stiles glances over at her, frowns.

She’s still turned away, face moonlight-pale and half covered by a curtain of hair.  Her feet are tucked up on the seat next to her, bare, after the number of times Stiles has argued with her about high heels on the upholstery.  She doesn’t look delicate or human or any of those breakable things that basically never describe Lydia ever, and she doesn’t even seem sad.   Young, maybe.  Just a teenage kid, just like him.  Just Lydia, off in one of her weird and distant moods that he never knows what to do with.

“It’s stochasticity,” Lydia says.  “Life is not a deterministic process.  There are two possible life-states, alive and dead–”

“Undead,” Stiles points out, and she actually moves her head enough to glare at him.

“You’re alive,” she says.  “You’re walking around alive in your own corpse.  If you’re alive you can die, and if you’re dead, you can’t come back to life.  And since every living thing experiences constant stochastic fluctuations between health and strength and alive-ness, and nearness to death, and those fluctuations never stop until death, eventually everything will land on death.  Entropy, Stiles.  Death is a lower energy-state than life.”

“The entropic heat-death of the universe isn’t predicted to happen for another ten to the one hundred years,” Stiles points out.  “That’s a one with a hundred zeroes after it.  And we’ve got a good 7.5 billion years before the sun explodes and takes out Earth, not to mention space travel and terraforming of other accessible planets before then.  I’m feeling okay.”

“I was in Pompeii, you know,” Lydia says.  Stiles jerks on the breaks before he realizes that the shadow up ahead is a bush, not a deer trying to cross the road.  Lydia almost never talks about her past.  He’s definitely never heard _this_ before.

“And you survived that!” Stiles points out.  That’s a good sign, right?

“Right, because it’s so hard to survive six years snacking on tourists at a popular summer vacation spot,” she tells him.  “I left before the volcano, idiot.  Years before.”

“That’s…good?”  Okay, now he’s completely lost her point.

“Others didn’t,” Lydia says.  “We can die by accident, the same way any human does.  San Francisco after the earthquake.  London.  Rome.”  They burn, still.  Not just in sun.  They do still burn.  “Sure, we’re indestructible by storm or hurricane, until one comes along and tears the roof off and lets all the sunlight in wherever you’re dead asleep.”

“Which is why you go to sleep six layers underground under a concrete slab if you’re planning to nap for more than a month, Lydia,” Stiles says.  He’s edging on annoyed, mostly because he can’t figure out what her point is, besides being needlessly depressing.

“Or somebody buys the land up under you and your corpse gets dragged out into the sun by tomb raiders,” she says.  “You remember Roxana.”

Stiles winces.  “Okay, that was just bad luck.”  He’d had to check out that museum exhibit, just out of morbid curiosity.  Ancient burial mounds were _supposed_ to be safe vacation spots.  Archaeologists: the real menace.

“Luck and random chance.  That’s stochasticity,” Lydia says.  “The world is changing.  We might be able to handle nuclear fallout, but not nuclear bombs.  We’ve had a few centuries of skepticism, but they’ll remember we exist again sooner or later.”

“Okay, thank you for ruining my good mood completely,” Stiles complains.  It _had_ been a pretty good night.  There was good hunting in San Francisco.  But now, _Lydia_.

“That’s not my point,” Lydia says, lifting her head and sitting up straighter, finally.  “You need to know we’re not immortal.  You can’t make plans like we are.”

“I _know that_ , Lydia.”  One of the better parts of being a vampire is that he gets to go whole decades without having to contemplate the certainty of eventually turning into a pile of dust fit for an archaeologist’s museum exhibit, but he’s not completely oblivious.

“Do you?” she asks.  “We’re not like humans.”

“No shit,” Stiles says.  Lydia ignores him.

“They don’t outlive each other long,” she says.  “Twenty, thirty years at most?  They make these strict pair bonds, and if one falls apart they might replace it, but once they’ve been married long enough they can assume that most of their life is defined by that relationship.  We don’t do that.  Not like them.”

“We can fall in love,” Stiles says.

“Of course we can,” says Lydia.  “And someday, you’re going to die and so am I, just like every other vampire you’ve ever met.  Given the survivorship rates for adult vampires, it’s more than likely that one of us will outlive the other by a thousand years.”

It’s an uncomfortable thought.  Stiles has been more or less in love with Lydia for basically his entire life, with the negligible exception of those first sixteen or seventeen years of breathing.  It’s hard to tell, sometimes, if she even likes him back.  She has to, right?

“It’s how we work,” Lydia says.  “Someday in a millennium or two, with luck, either you’ll look back on me with what I hope will be distant fondness for the sire you knew for the first few hundred years of life, or I’ll remember you as yet another fledge who came and went with the centuries.”

“Another?” Stiles asks.  Lydia smiles faintly, and glances back out the window in the direction of the moon.

“Did you think you were the first?” she asks.  “The first one to survive past the century?  I’ve made vampires before you.”  She tilts her head and looks at him, considering.  “You might be the oldest.  Nearly, anyway.  Hit five hundred and we’ll see.”

“Wow,” Stiles says.  There’s another hour back to Beacon Hills and the sky’s already pale gray above, the dark spears of the pines almost visible as green again.  It’s going to get bright soon.  Right now all he can think about is who Lydia’s other fledges were, how they died.  Who else lasted five hundred years?  Were any of them at Pompeii?

“You think turning Scott means you’d always be together,” Lydia says.  Stiles almost slams on the breaks in surprise, but she’s not even looking at him, all over again.  She’s far away again, somewhere else out beyond the window.  “A few centuries is a long way from always.  You need to know that.”

“That’s Allison,” Stiles says, stiff and careful and keeping his hands right where they are on the wheel, not a glance at his phone in the cup holder, not at all.  “You remember Allison?  The one who’s actually in love with Scott?”

“Mmm,” Lydia says in distant agreement.  “Her too.”


	6. Family (Lydia's Lore Lecture Hour: Lineage)

**Family (Lydia’s Lore Lecture Hour: Lineage)**

“How can you not know what your line is, anyway?” Allison asks.  “I mean, that’s kind of a hard thing to forget.”

“Hmm,” Lydia says.  She flips another page in Vogue.  Here Allison is, right in Lydia’s bedroom, and all they’re doing is homework.  It’s unseemly.  “It’s not as big of a deal as it seems.”

“It’s your line of descent from the very first vampires and how you know who you’re related to.  That kind of seems like a big deal to me.”  Allison taps the back end of her pen against her paper, thud-thud-thud-thud-thud.  “Is Stiles your sire?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Lydia scoffs.  She flips another page.  More spring fashion trends.  Mauve is in again.  Delightful.  “You know, it’s all made up, anyway.”

“What is?” Allison asks doubtfully.

“The lines,” Lydia says.  “I mean, I’m sure they’re accurate for the past two thousand years or so, but before that they’re actually, really, pretty much entirely fake.”  Macrame handbags.  How very seventies.  Lydia considers for a moment.  “Mostly.”

Allison laughs uncomfortably.  “No they’re not,” she says.  “They’re the lineages.  The line of Silver comes from the Matriarch Argyra of Greece, she was turned by one of the First Ones over four thousand years ago.  We all know that.”

“If you say so,” Lydia says.  Argyra _could_ have been bitten by a First One, Lydia supposes.  It was entirely possible.  If Lydia ever runs into her again, maybe she’ll ask.

“Of course I say so,” Allison says.  “What are you implying?”

“Just the version of vampire history they don’t like to tell,” Lydia says.  “The lineages of vampires were developed under the Roman Empire as a way of establishing rank and allegiances in a codified way that those in power could control and understand.”  She flips another page.  Ooh, hats.

“Okay,” Allison says uncertainly.  “So what was there before that?”

“It was different in different places,” Lydia says.  A perfume ad shot on green rolling hills overlooking the ocean.  She flips the page exactly as slowly and casually as all of the others.  “It was 3000 BC, they didn’t exactly have high-speed railways.  It took most of a year just to walk across what’s currently considered Europe if you only bothered to stop to grab an occasional bite to eat, let alone east of the Urals or south of the Mediterranean.  The Minoan vampires weren’t exactly coordinating with the ones in pre-Roman Ireland.”

“And nobody bothered to keep track of who their sires were?” Allison asks.  “I don’t buy it.”

“You know, the century for a fledge rule is only about fifteen hundred years old,” Lydia says absently.  “You don’t need to stay with your sire for that long.  You only need to supplement your diet with vampire blood for a few decades or so.  There used to be clans.”

“Clans?” Allison echoes.

“Clans,” Lydia says.  “As in a handful of vampires all living together and collaboratively raising fledges to join them.  It was all very Communist and boring.”  And it’s all dust now, anyway.  “Of course, you could always leave them and go roaming.  There were vampires who got all the way to south Africa or east Asia before the Romans came along and integrated into whole new cultures, and they still don’t follow the same lineage system.”  Or you could stop right in the cradle of civilization and stay there for four hundred years.  Always so many options.  For instance, that model’s hair style: not her best option.

“And then the Romans came along,” Allison says.

“Roman Conquest, blah blah blah, revisionist history, blah blah,” Lydia agrees, several pages of ads, blah, blah, blah.  “Pretty standard historical nonsense.  Everybody wants to be important.”

“How do you know all of this, anyway?” Allison asks.  Lydia’s going to have to go back through this entire magazine again later, she’s missed half the interesting design choices.

“What, they don’t teach fledges basic history these days?” she asks archly.

“These days?”  Allison asks.  “Just how old are you, anyway?” Lydia looks up over the top edge of her magazine.

“Well,” she says.  “Older than you.”  Lydia flips her hair back over her shoulder.  “Honestly, Allison, that lab report’s not going to write itself.”


	7. Gloaming (Lydia's Lore Lecture Hour: Light)

**Gloaming (Lydia’s Lore Lecture Hour: Light)**

“We’re not real, you know,” Lydia says.  She shakes the taper out, drops it head down into the empty urn next to the candelabra, cutting off the smoke.  The candles send weird, flickering shadows over the dim walls of the cluttered room.

“You seem pretty real to me?” Scott says.

He doesn’t understand Lydia.  She was confusing even before he found out she was undead and maybe even ancient, and now she makes even less sense.  A lot of things in Scott’s life right now make less sense.

“We’re animated by magic.  Supernatural powers derived from pacts with the devil and devouring the lives and souls of the innocent.”  She tilts her head with a faint smile for him.  “At least, that’s what the legends say.”

“I don’t believe that,” Scott says solidly.  That’s not Allison, and that’s not Stiles.  And maybe he doesn’t know her very well, but he’s pretty sure that’s not Lydia, either.

“Maybe not,” Lydia says, and Scott feels like he’s had some kind of test–maybe not the pass/fail kind, but the kind where Lydia collects all the data she wants and Scott gets to feel uncomfortably like the unsuspecting subject of a nature documentary.  “We’re not right, though.  Our molecules don’t hold together the right way.  Magic.”

She holds a hand up a couple of inches from the candles, almost idly, considering.  “Light is both a particle and a wave,” Lydia says, with a touch of impatience, like she’s trying to school him on his physics homework.  “Visible color represents the wavelengths of light reflected by an object, while all other wavelengths in the visible spectrum are absorbed.  Transparent or translucent materials don’t absorb or block certain wavelengths of light at all.  Not to mention the wavelengths you can’t see with your naked eye, some of which you absorb, reflect, or simply let pass right through.  With me so far?”

“Right, ultraviolet and infrared,” Scott offers.  He’s starting to see what Stiles meant about wanting to impress Lydia kind of all the time.  He really doesn’t want her to think he’s an idiot.

Lydia rolls her eyes anyway.  “For a start, yes,” she says.  “But like I said, we don’t exist.  Our atoms aren’t held together by the same molecular forces as literally everything else in the universe.  We don’t absorb energy right.  Not from food, and not from photons.  If we’re not careful, it cuts right through us.  Watch.”

Her hand’s been casting a dark gray shadow on the nearest wall, overlapping half a dozen times and wavering slightly with the flickering of the candles.  The rest of her shadow, like Scott’s, is lost in the jumble of shapes and darkness past the gaping black hole of the doorway in the room behind them, stretching long and falling over antique-looking furniture and the big-screen TV taller than Scott is.  This whole house looks like it should belong to some tall lady in a floor-length black dress if it’s not in a museum, and there’s Lydia talking about particle physics and dressed like she just spent however much money clothes shopping in downtown LA.  There’s a slim, silver MacBook Pro on the table next to the candelabra, which looks like it’s made of real gold and covered in more curlicues than Scott’s seen on one piece of furniture in his life.  He’s going with it, so far, as much as he can.

Lydia tilts her hand, and Scott watches obediently.  The shadow behind it shifts with it, then–fades.  Almost completely.

Scott stares.  Lydia’s hand is still there, cast a little red from the flames.  There are still shadows everywhere else in the room, even Lydia’s, mostly, but the shadow of her hand has disappeared from the wall like it’s made of nothing more than glass.

“You won’t see this from every vampire,” Lydia says.  “It takes work to stay visible to your eye but let enough light pass through to the other side.”  And then it’s back, all at once, like it never happened.  “It works the other way, too.”  Scott can barely tear his eyes away from the wall to glance at her face, and then back to the wall, because now that her hand is casting a shadow again it’s darker.  Sharp-edged, deep, deeper, stretching out…

“That can’t work,” Scott blurts out.  “There’s light reflecting off everything else in the room.  You can’t block it all out from one angle like that.”

Lydia blinks, and then smiles.  “Well done,” she says.  “The light bends towards us.  I told you, we’re magic.  We don’t follow the normal rules of reality.”

This was definitely not covered on Scott’s physics test.  “I really don’t get it,” he admits.

“Young vampires like Allison barely have any trouble at all,” Lydia says.  “They’re still practically real.  The older you get, the more work it is to hold it all together.  But then, some of us have more skill than others.  I can be invisible if I want to.  I can be visible standing next to you and not let a single ray of light bounce off to show my reflection in a mirror on my other side.”

 _I can show up in mirrors_ , Allison had said.   _Can_ , not _do_.  “So what happens in sunlight?” Scott asks.  Judging by the twist to Lydia’s face, it’s either exactly the right question, or the wrong one.

“All the other wavelengths,” Lydia says.  “If we pay attention, we can reflect.  Sometimes we don’t.  Sometimes they pour right through us.  Sometimes, if we’re not paying the right amount of attention, we can absorb them all.”

Something’s happening to her hand, with its shadow still so long and dark.  The side held up near the candle looks shadowed, almost black, even though the light is just a few inches from it.  Everything around the tips of Lydia’s fingers seems to be getting dim, and the look on her face–

“Stop!”  Scott shoves the base of the candelabra away.  Lydia drops her hand and raises her eyebrows at him.  “It’s hurting you.”

“It’s _candle light_ ,” Lydia says slowly, with heavy annunciation.  “I can handle it.”

“Let me see your hand,” Scott says anyway.  Lydia huffs a sigh and lets him take it.  The palm looks a little red, though it’s hard to tell.  Could she change that, reflect a different color if she wanted to?

“Well, Allison was right,” Lydia says reflectively.  “You are insane about vampires.”


	8. Home

**Home**

Not the slightest tap of a heartbeat, not one hiss of breath from inside his apartment.  And yet.

Stiles–he was going by Stiles again, here, without anybody to bitch about it and it wasn’t like anybody so much as blinked at a weird name in New York–shifted his artfully pre-distressed leather satchel to his left arm, ready to swing as a weapon, ready to drop it and run.  Ready to stop in the doorway of his living room and lounge as casually and unconcernedly as the most hipster of early twentysomething New Yorkers against thin air.

He slipped a little, anyway, when Lydia lifted her– _his_ wine glass, full of _his_ pretentiously expensive Argentinian Malbec–and smiled at him.  She always did that to him.  So much for vampire grace.

“So where’s Jackoff?” Stiles asked, tossing his bookbag in a corner.  Lydia already had a second glass poured for him, but she paused in the middle of handing it over to look down her nose at him severely.

“Who?” she asked, sweet with poison.

Stiles leaned over and nabbed the glass lightly from her fingers anyway.  Lydia hadn’t turned him because he knew when to quit.  “The asshole fledge you were carting around last time I saw you?  Did you finally give up on trying to raise him properly and stake him out in the sun for a day?”

“ _Jackson_ is in London,” Lydia said tightly, a little less sweetly.

“You hate London,” Stiles pointed out.  Lydia didn’t like big cities much in general, but she’d hated London for at least six centuries.

“Yes, but it’s a little big to burn to the ground again, isn’t it?” she asked rhetorically.  Stiles was almost sure she hadn’t been responsible for the fire the first time.  Almost.  They’d been in separate parts of Europe by then, though, and it was always a little hard to tell how much of what Lydia said should be taken seriously.

“Wait a second,” Stiles said.  “Are you saying that jackass left you?  And he’s still in one piece?”  Stiles frowned, and did some quick mental math.  “Isn’t he only like fifty?”

“I traded him to an Amanita clan in Scotland,” Lydia said.  “Those books you were keeping in the undercroft on Isle Sgàth are in a storage unit in Glasgow, by the way.  Ten pounds a week.  I told them to bill you.”

“You had to give them Sgàth so they’d take him?”  Stiles raised his eyebrows.  It wasn’t a very big island even by the standards of the Hebrides, and nobody living had set foot there in at least two hundred years, but it was a good place to store things or take a nap for a decade.  And it was an _entire island_.  “Why not just kill him?”

“It’s a lease,” Lydia said.  “I see New York hasn’t improved your ability to take a hint.”

“Why not just let me kill him?” Stiles pressed.  “I’d do it for you.”  God, Jackson had been annoying.  It was why Stiles had barely seen Lydia since…what, the sixties?  They’d run into each other a few times in between, but Jackson was always around.  The pretentious asshole.

Stiles was currently a disaffected, rich-by-inheritance NYU undergrad with a penchant for hanging out at an indie fair-trade coffee shop that hosted weekly poetry slam nights.  Stiles knew pretentious.

“Because he wanted something else and I found it for him,” Lydia snapped.

“He’s an asshole,” Stiles pointed out, despite Lydia’s glower.  She wouldn’t have come here if she’d wanted somebody to take it easy on her.  “Seriously, the only thing you can say for him is that he lasted longer than the last guy and might actually survive long enough to fledge out of someone’s protection.  Somehow, god knows how.  He was an asshole.  Your taste is terrible.”  Lydia liked young men, which was fine as a game, but ninety percent of the boys who intrigued her enough to turn went feral and had to be put down within a week.  Jackson had been particularly bad, in Stiles’ opinion.  It just figured that he was the one who’d actually manage to survive.  “Seriously, have you ever turned a fledge and had it come out well?”

“ _Not once_ ,” Lydia said, very pointedly.  Stiles paused, at least for a second.  Okay, he’d walked right into that one.

Well, Stiles was an asshole too, albeit a much smarter one than most of Lydia’s boys.  She’d raised him that way.

“Hey, you’re the one sitting on my couch drinking my wine,” he pointed out.  The bottle, when he picked it up, was already empty.  “You know there are some way better bottles in the back of the cabinet for people I actually want to impress.”  It was almost a peace offering–Lydia was, even after all this time, still someone he wanted to impress when you got right down to it.  The wine collection was for show, part of the display, but the flavor wasn’t bad when you got used to it.  It was better, of course, as a sweet-sour seasoning running through somebody else’s blood.

“Not any more,” Lydia said sweetly.  Great.

“Well in that case, there’s PBR in the fridge,” Stiles said ungraciously, and she could drink that crap without him.

“What is that?” she asked, already making a face like she could guess from his tone.

“You don’t want to know,” Stiles admitted.

Lydia stretched, resting her empty glass on the coffee table and lounging back so artfully against the arm of the couch.  “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

“For tonight?” Stiles asked cautiously.

“For the decade,” said Lydia.  “You know how I feel about cities.”

He’d been here for three years so far and he had maybe another five in this apartment and this setup, tops, before he’d have to be going anyway.  He’d probably have to grow a beard somewhere in there too.  Stiles hated trying to grow beards.  They always came in patchy.

“Where to?” he asked.  Humans were pretty much humans everywhere.  Besides, as much culinary variety as there was for the people of New York City, for a vampire there wasn’t much to choose from.  Deer might not be as tasty or half as filling, but straight human blood, night after night, just got old.  And it would be a sad day in hell before he started eyeing city pigeons.

“Anywhere,” Lydia said.  “We can play that game you like.”

“Frame the serial killer?” Stiles furrowed his brow.  There were a lot of games he liked.  Life got boring after the second century or so.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Lydia scoffed.  “The one where we pretend to be cousins and see how long it takes them to realize we don’t have parents.”

Last time they’d played that game, they’d taken a dining tour through the outskirts of half the Hooverviles in Seattle.  Not as much fun as the twenties, but what could you do.  It was a pretty good game, just not Lydia’s usual.

“You want to pretend to be a kid?”  Stiles asked.

“Mmm,” Lydia agreed. “It’ll be relaxing.  I haven’t tried to take over a modern high school in a while.”  Well _that_ was something Stiles had to see first-hand.

“So basically you’re looking for a small pond where you can splash around and be the great big octopus sea-witch for a while,” he interpreted.  “Sounds good to me.”

“Tiamat,” Lydia said, head cocked to the side as she examined the red glow through her wine glass like a vaguely interesting piece of jewelry.  “Primordial mother dragon, ruler of the seas, who smote chaos into the world.”

A great big Tiamat in a small pond.  He didn’t think it would catch on as a saying in the long run, but yeah.  “Sounds about right to me,” Stiles said.  “Come on, let’s go hit a bar, I’m hungry.  I’ll introduce you around my favorite snack place.”

Lydia rolls her eyes.  “Am I going to like it?” she asks.

“Every guy in there is guaranteed to be ready to explain how much more he knows than you about any topic you can bring up at the drop of a hat,” Stiles promises.  “You’ll have a great time.”

Lydia always enjoyed it when she could eat someone alive figuratively as well as literally.


	9. In The Year Of Our Lord 1482

**In The Year Of Our Lord 1482**

“It would be an interesting test, though, wouldn’t it?” the werewolf asked.  The woman across from him leaned back in her chair, perfectly comfortable.  Her dining companion had a plate, though the table before her was bare.  There was not another soul in the crumbling, mossy old keep–a fact they could both hear well.

“You must believe that if God had intended werewolves to become vampires, He would have made it known by now?” she asked.

The werewolf raised his eyebrows.  He looked no more than twenty-five years of age, younger, surely–but he was a werewolf.  They aged strangely.  At least she had simply stopped at…whatever year of her life it had been, when she died.  “You are a Christian, madame?” he asked.

“Well,” she said, “I’ve lived through any number of popes, sometimes all at the same time, and five hundred years of Holy Emperors in Rome ordained by God himself.  I move with the times.”

“But you predate Him, of course,” the werewolf said.  It was her turn to raise her eyebrows.

“That’s almost blasphemy,” she said.  “The son of God, now.  I’ll admit to having several centuries on him.”  She smiled, cat-like and dangerous.  “Would you care to guess how many?”

“I’d never speculate,” he said.  “But let’s talk about Socrates and Plato, then, rather than Augustine.  I think you’d probably prefer them.  Do you think there’s truly an immutable inner nature to a werewolf or a vampire that can’t become anything else, though humans may be changed into either?”

She watched him for a moment, the charming, pretentious man who’d read St. Augustine and Aristotle and had come her for the pleasure of her company.  Her company was, of course, a great pleasure in and of itself, of course, but still.  Still.

“I wonder about you, Peter Hale,” she said.  “There have been men who accepted the spider’s invitation to dinner and expected to leave the web after eating the spider.  You strike me as a man who knows better.”

“I’m only stuck by your beauty, milady,” he promised gallantly.  She almost believed him.

“You don’t need me to give you long life,” she said.  “I’m not sure what it is you think I have that you want.”

“A chance at something unique,” Peter Hale said.


	10. Jealousy

**Jealousy**

“All I’m saying is, Allison may be a very nice girl and all, but she’s not actually good for you.”  Scott doesn’t bother to glance up from his history homework.

“Oh, no?” he asks.  Alexander Hamilton.  He wonders if Stiles or Lydia ever knew Alexander Hamilton.  Stiles sure seems to be doing more talking than essay-writing.

“Well I mean, she’s a vampire, for one,” Stiles says.  “Second point, her entire family, also vampires.”

Scott looks up this time, eyebrows raised.  “So are you,” he says.

Stiles doesn’t even miss a beat.  “I, also, am not good for you,” he says.  “I’m a terrible influence.  Just ask your mother.  But at least I admit it, and I’m a lot less likely to kill you than Victoria Argent is.”

“You lied to me about being a vampire for almost a year and a half,” Scott points out.

“Yes, because I’m a bad person and a bad influence,” Stiles says.  He rolls off the foot of Scott’s bed to his feet, the better to pace and wave his hands around, Scott guesses.  It goes with the speech, emphatic and just slightly too fast–the way Stiles talks, Scott knows by now, when he’s on the edge of trying to convince himself of something.  “I’m seventeen years old, and unlike you, who’s only been seventeen for, what, six months?  I’ve been seventeen for four hundred and sixty years.  I have a lot of practice at being reckless and stupid and not thinking things through.  Trust me, I’m pretty good at it by now.”

“Oh yeah, I’ve noticed,” Scott grins.  “Maybe I’m a good influence on you.”

“Probably,” Stiles admits.  “Which may be why I’m telling you this.  Allison is bad news.”

“Stiles, I don’t want to hear it,” Scott says, for the umpteenth time.  Stiles stops directly in front of Scott’s armchair and fixes him with a look that Scott’s gotten used to, over the course of their friendship.

“Listen to me,” Stiles says.  “Allison is dangerous because she wants the best for you.  She’s going to say she wants the best for you.  And she knows damn well that the best thing for you is to stop being seventeen, to run off to college and grow up and stop being stupid and impulsive and hungry all the time, because that’s what being seventeen means and it’s no good for anyone.  The best possible thing for you in your life is sunshine and puppy dogs and fluffy little kitty-cats, right?  With a picket fence and three point five small, squishy human children to raise into exemplary human adults.”  Scott is a little skeptical about Stiles’ picture of human adulthood, but Stiles is on a rant and Scott knows from long experience not to bother trying to interrupt one of those.  “Allison knows that, and she wants that for you, because she loves you.   And she also absolutely does not want that at all because she knows damn well she’ll lose you that way, and part of being seventeen, like you, and me, and Allison Argent, is falling so deeply, stupidly in love with somebody that you never want to let them go.  Ever.”

“Allison’s not going to hurt me,” Scott says.  Firmly.  It always works better to argue Stiles with basic, simple truths.

“She’s also not going to graduate college with you,” says Stiles.  “Or marry you, or any of those other things.  Okay, if you get Allison, you get her as she is, exactly right now.  Forever.”

“I know, okay?” Scott says.  “Believe me, I _know_.”  Allison is perfect.  Exactly the way she is, exactly right now, she’s perfect.  And Scott…

Scott likes being human.  Most days he fits inside his own skin.  He didn’t, always, but he’s figured enough of himself out this past year.  What he has is good.  He’s got his weird makeshift bedroom clinic, where he’s useful, and important, and sometimes even saves people’s lives.  He’s got an amazing girlfriend who loves him and somehow thinks he’s sexy even though he never makes it off the bench in lacrosse.  He’s got his best friend, who gets him, and none of it can last.  Because Scott can’t last.

“Listen,” Stiles says. “It’s rough.  I get it.  But there are only three ways things can end with Allison, and two of them end with you guys being apart, and two of them involve you dying.  And the longer you keep drawing it out, the worse it’s going to get.”

“So I’m supposed to just break up with her?” Scott asks.  “Is that what you want?”

“Yes!” Stiles says, throwing his hands up in the air.  Then, “No!  That’s not even the…”  He sighs, and drops back down to sit on a corner of the bed.

Scott frowns.  “Then what do you want?” he demands.  “Seriously, because my girlfriend and my best friend are both vampires, my life is incredibly weird, and this didn’t really come with a manual, so I could use some actual advice here instead of just telling me it’s all going to go wrong.”

“I want the exact same thing Allison wants, I’m just not conflicted about it or going to end up accidentally draining you dry in bed because I can’t get my head on straight,” Stiles says.  “I want you with me for the rest of however long I happen to have to be alive.  You’re my best friend.  I want us to be seventeen together forever.  And because I’m basically a pretty selfish person, which is another side effect of being eternally a teenager, I’m willing to admit it.”

Scott has to stare for a minute.  He maybe blinks a few times.  He remembers everything Lydia said, but… “You want me to be a vampire?”  He needs to check, just to be sure.

Stiles slumps down, hands limp on his knees.  “Being seventeen sucks, Scott,” he says.  “Critical thinking centers aren’t developed right, or something.  You always want something, and half the time you can’t have it at all, and I’ll tell you, I make great long-term plans, but they tend to kind of fall apart in the details.  I’ve never…”

He trails off mid-sentence.  “You’ve never?” Scott prompts.  Stiles gets lost in the storm of his own thoughts like that sometimes.  It’s not that hard to get him going again.

“I’m the dumb kid who left town to chase the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen for a week through the woods because he thought she had something to do with a string of local murders and he wanted to impress her,” Stiles says.  “And also bring her to justice.  At the same time.  I am that dumb kid, and I’m pretty much going to stay that dumb kid for, like.  The next two thousand years if I’m lucky.”

“I’m not sure you’re really selling this,” Scott says.  He’s not really sure what else to say.

It gets him a crooked half a smile, and a shrug.  Stiles says, “It works better with you.  It’s easier being that kid, with you.”


	11. Kin

**Kin**

“So at least my dad definitely doesn’t think you or Stiles are a threat,” Allison says.  Lydia holds a dress up against her and looks her over critically.  Allison lets her, because they’re…well, they’re friends now, she guesses.  “I don’t think they really…”

What her parents had said was that Lydia would be lucky to survive the decade, let alone the century, without some older vampire taking offense and brushing her out of the way permanently.  Allison doesn’t particularly want to say that part out loud to Lydia.

“You know, Allison, as your friend,” Lydia remarks, pulling the dress away and putting it back on the rack, apparently not good enough.  “I have to tell you that it’s incredibly creepy that you still call him that in public.”

Allison shifts uncomfortably.  “He’s my dad,” she says.  He treats her as an adult most of the time nowadays.  Both her parents do.  And it’s not that unusual for a fledge to stay with their sire after they’ve passed the century mark and grown out of needing protection.

“He’s your sire,” Lydia says.  “It’s one thing to team up with vampires at a different age-state and offer each other a little extra cover, but this is just sad.  The sire and fledge relationship is thousands of years old.  It’s about blood and sex and debt, and the only time you should call your sire ‘Daddy’ is if you’re feeling really, really kinky that day.  And not in front of other vampires.”

Allison hadn’t eaten recently enough for her face to flush with blood, but her throat goes tight with shame and embarrassment and anger.  “It’s not like that,” she says.  “Lydia, they raised me.”

“And I raised Stiles, but you don’t see him calling me Mommy,” Lydia says pointedly.

She’s seen Lydia and Stiles together, seen them bickering and playing off each other.  Seen them hunt.   _Blood and sex and debt_ , Allison can see that, for them.  It just has nothing to do with her relationship with her parents.

“No, Lydia,” Allison says.  “I mean they _raised_ me.  They found me when I was a baby, and they brought me up for seventeen years, as a human, before they made me like them.  I’m their daughter.”  It isn’t that weird, is it?  Her parents and Kate, they all call Gerard ‘Father’.  Lydia doesn’t know everything.  “I’ve always been their daughter.”

Lydia stares.  “You’re telling me,” she says, “that two vampires raised a human child almost to adulthood and then turned her?”

“That’s what happened,” Allison says steadily.  It’s unusual, sure, but it’s not that weird.  It’s not.

“Oh my god,” Lydia says.


	12. Lust

**Lust**

The first week of a new school, Allison has learned with long, long practice, always kind of sucks.

“Hey, look, I’m sorry if we got off on the wrong foot,” she tries.  The werewolf stares.

“You tried to kill a member of my pack,” he says flatly.  One tiny, teeny little mistake.  It would have been so much easier to paper over if she didn’t sit directly in front of Isaac Lahey in physics class.  And if he hadn’t decided to follow her out into the hall in the middle of class when she fled for a so-called bathroom break.  And if Mr. Harris hadn’t followed them _both_ out there and given them detention.  Together.  In this tiny little storage room.

 Allison winces.  “I’m sorry,” she says again, although technically so far she’s only said it to Scott in the bloody aftermath.  How many times is she going to have to apologize to make this go away?  “It really was an accident.”

“Right,” Isaac says.  “You just accidentally tripped and knocked Derek off a cliff and stabbed him in the heart with a silver dagger.”

“It’s claws, actually,” Allison says.  Isaac just blinks at her.  “Silver claws?  Like an ornamental gauntlet?  It’s a whole family...line...thing.”  Vampires are supposed to be above hunting with swords or guns or any kind of actual weapons, or something, but wrestling and ripping things apart with your bare hands is apparently inelegant.  It’s also messy and not fun, but Allison really doesn’t feel like explaining to her parents why a fully-grown vampire needs a bow and arrows to bring prey down in the middle of the forest, so she wears the claws.  It’s traditional.

It also happens to make a really effective weapon against werewolves, which will be great in the upcoming war Allison no doubt started the other night, but not so much when she was really just trying to get something a little different for dinner.  Next time she doesn’t want to deal with the hassle of isolating a human victim, putting them in trance, wiping out short-term memory and making sure they get home safely, she’s sticking to white-tailed deer.

“Right,” Isaac says again.  “Well if it’s ornamental family claws, that changes everything.”

It doesn’t help that Allison’s _been_ drinking deer blood for the past week, mostly out of petulance, and she’s _hungry_ .  Isaac smells like a werewolf--human, but _more_ , more strength, more wildness, more...flavor.  Right now he also smells like more anxiety, which makes sense given that he’s standing in this supply closet with one of the only three people in school--maybe one of the only three people he’s ever met, as a werewolf--who could almost definitely take him in a fight.

Isaac’s sixteen or seventeen.  Actually sixteen or seventeen.  Most werewolves don’t make it to thirty.  Thirsty vampires aren’t the only reason why, but, well.  It’s a lot easier to get away with killing a werewolf pup than a normal human.  Their packs are already used to covering up the deaths of their own.  She could drink him dry.

“I said sorry,” Allison said, which is the third time the word’s come out of her mouth in the past ten minutes, and the _last_.  It’s not like she actually hurt Isaac.  Yet.  “Look, ask Scott if you don’t believe me.  Either way, let’s just get this done.”

Isaac’s been inching closer and closer to the open door of the supply closet like Allison won’t notice.  It’s fine if he’s afraid of her, but like hell is he leaving her to do all this restocking by herself.  Allison is a hundred and twenty-two years old.  She doesn’t need to be here.

He pauses, though, just inside the door.  “Scott likes everybody,” he says, clinching Allison’s guess that Scott McCall has actually made friends with literally every supernatural entity in Beacon Hills, _even the ones he somehow still thinks are human_.

“He wouldn’t like it if I killed you,” Allison says mildly.  It’s maybe alarming how much she cares about that.

She could probably finagle her way into throwing Isaac down on her bed, riding him until he begged for mercy, and sinking her teeth into his neck but leaving just enough blood for him to survive.  Lydia would probably approve, even if her parents wouldn’t--and if they used Isaac’s bed, they could probably do it half a dozen times before Allison’s parents found out.  Werewolves regenerate blood fast.   But maybe Scott wouldn’t like that either.

Maybe Allison doesn’t _want_ Scott to like that.  For reasons that have nothing at all to do with the blood.


	13. Meet and Greet (dinner party, take one)

**Meet and Greet (dinner party, take one)**

Victoria Argent laid a beautiful table.  She was a tremendous cook, for someone who hadn’t subsisted on human food in–Lydia approximated, based on Victoria’s air of power–six hundred years.  It made for a very interesting first impression.

She had a century and a half on Stiles, at least, which of course had him sitting like an awkward sixty-year-old and fumbling his cutlery.   Good.  Stiles wasn’t as good at masking his own aura of age and power as Lydia was, but he was excellent at looking like an idiot.

There were candles and wine on the table, and an embroidered linen table runner, one bought at Macy’s on sale no more than a year ago.  Jackson was older than every single piece of furniture in this house.  Every box was unpacked, every item slotted perfectly into place as if the Argents had always been right here.  Allison sipped at a glass of water and Lydia knew everything she needed to know about this branch of the line of Silver.

“So where are you from?” Lydia asked, flipping her hair artfully over her shoulder.  “I mean, originally.”

It was the kind of incredibly crass and rude question a barely-fledged new vampire might ask, one she only expected to get away with tonight because the Argents were so dedicated to this little facade of domesticity.  She could feel Stiles and Allison both wince.  The heel of her shoe found Stiles’ ankle under the table.

“Europe,” Chris said shortly.  He was younger, but, hmmm.  Not Victoria’s fledge, unless Lydia missed her guess entirely.  Well that was surely a fascinating love story.

“Tell me, Stiles,” Victoria said, with a serpent’s glittering smile.  “Who was your sire?”

“Uh…”  She managed to catch Stiles with his mouth full, of course, which was fine by Lydia.  Nothing they said tonight would be a lie.  They weren’t dishonest, after all.  He just wasn’t to mention certain things.  Lydia didn’t particularly care to tell the Argents any more than they could figure out for themselves.  “She was definitely Lady Elena of Szàtmar when I met her.  Um, I don’t know, she’s had a lot of different names?  She was Annabelle Black?  Rhona of Ceann Rois?”  He butchered the pronunciation, but that was only fair.  Lydia’s Gaelic was crap too.  It had been a long time since Ceann Rois.  “Abigail Hawke, Meredith Butcher, Sabina Romanova–”

“I see,” Victoria cut him off, which was the only way to deal with Stiles when he started in on a list like that anyway.  Lydia hid a smile in another polite bite of the very rare roast beef.  It was even an appropriate answer to the question.  Victoria only asked who she _was_.

“And her lineage?” Chris asked.  It was polite, after a fashion.  It certainly wasn’t any ruder than Lydia’d been tonight.  Then again, she was seventeen, of course.  That was much too young to know better.  And she was old enough by far to get away with it.  The Argents were middle-aged in every possible sense.  No excuses.

Stiles glanced at her, just for a moment, although Lydia knew Victoria caught it.  He played it off well, though.  “Um,” Stiles said again.  “When you say lineage, you mean the vampire that sired her?”

“It’s a simple question,” Chris said pleasantly.  He was very pleasant, Lydia noticed.  He smiled often.  He was very skilled at showing his teeth.

“Yeah, she really didn’t like to talk about that,” Stiles said.  “I’m…not actually sure.”

“How fascinating,” Victoria said.  “Most vampires can trace their lineage all the way back to the first ones.”

Lydia very carefully did not cough ‘ _Bullshit_ ’ into her napkin.


	14. Nineteen-aught-six

**Nineteen-aught-six**

“Tante Katrine!”  She was a clumsy, dark-haired blur, launching herself down the front steps towards the delicate woman in silk alighting from her carriage.  The horses quivered and shied away from both of them, but Aunt Kat jumped down spryly to the cobblestones and caught Alice warmly around her shoulders, laughing.

“ _Ma chere_ , it’s good to see you again,” she said.  “Are your parents about?”

“Inside,” Alice said, and meant asleep.  It was a muggy, cloud-covered sort of a gray New Orleans day, not much sunlight to be seen, but her parents preferred to avoid daylight as much as they could all the same.  There was so much of it in Louisiana.  She could handle the maids and the markets herself–at least, she could now.

“Well show me inside, show me around,” Aunt Kat instructed, wrapping an arm around Alice’s shoulders and steering her towards the door.  “I wanted to talk to you anyway.”  And the pit of Alice’s too, too-human stomach churned.   _Merde_.

They sat cross-legged on the bed in the guest room, on the third floor of the townhouse with the beautiful views of the French Quarter, all hidden by the thickest curtains money could buy.  It was too hot without the breeze, stifling.  Kat didn’t seem to notice.

“Your birthday’s soon, I hear,” Kat said.  Alice looked down at her hands with their ragged fingernails.  “Nervous?”

She looked up quickly.  “No, I…”  Kat laughed.

“You’ll do,” she said.  “You’ll do just fine.  Your parents have been teaching you sixteen years for this.  That’s half a mortal life.”  Not much of a mortal life, but Aunt Kat could talk in generalities like that.  Aunt Kat slept in long naps that lasted more than Alice’s entire life.

“I know,” Alice said.  “I’m strong.  I know who I am.  I’m ready.”

“That’s my girl.”  Kat brushed a wisp of hair out of her face.  “Alice d’Argent.  Fledgeling of the line of Silver.”

She shivered, from Kat’s cold fingers or the name.  It wasn’t hers yet.  Soon, but not yet.

“Will you be there?” Alice asked.  “Are you here to…”

She trailed off.  Kat made her feel safe, just like her parents did, and yet…

She’d seen Aunt Kat’s real teeth, only twice.  Alice shouldn’t be scared, but they scared her.  There was a pit in the bottom of her gut that wasn’t brave, wasn’t strong, hadn’t been raised as a member of the line of Silver her entire life.  There was a part of her that was just too _human_.

She’d get rid of it soon.  She’d be strong, then.

Kat laughed again, anyway.  “Who, me?  I don’t sire fledges, sweet one.  Far too much work for the likes of me.”  Alice wrinkled her nose without meaning to, vaguely offended.  “You know, Father and I thought your parents were crazy when they took you on, but look at you now, beautiful girl.  You’re going to be a credit to this line.”

“I’ll try,” Alice said, glancing down at her hands again.

“I’ll make you a promise, though,” Aunt Kat said.  “Actually, I’ll make you two promises.   _D’accord_?”

“ _D’accord_ ,” Alice agreed.  She’d want a promise from Alice in return, surely, but Alice would do her best no matter what Aunt Kat asked anyway.

“You know there are only two ways this can go,” Kat said.  “We don’t have to worry about the sire’s power or control here, but you must be strong and stubborn and know yourself better than most humans ever learn.  And you have to be lucky.”

“I know,” Alice said.  She could do it, she thought.  She hoped.  Her mother taught her to be strong and her father taught her to be stubborn.  She just didn’t know if she could make herself enough luck.

“If it goes wrong, I promise I won’t let your parents nurse you along for the next two decades in a cage in the basement,” Kat said.  “I’ll make sure it’s quick.”

Alice’s insides ran icier than the touch of her mother’s skin in wintertime.  Kat smiled.  It was a promise–an offer.  A gift.  Mercy.

She wasn’t _real_ until this happened.  She was only a human.  Little, and breakable, and disposable if anything went wrong.  Her parents were such tremendous immovable truths in the world.  Compared to them, Alice’s whole life so far was…nothing, really.  A sweet little daydream.  Aunt Kat was only promising a kindness, the way she might shoot a horse to put it out of its misery.

“Thank you,” Alice said.  She wouldn’t let it come to that.  She was strong.  She’d be strong enough.

“And the second promise is, when that doesn’t happen,” Kat said with easy confidence, “I’ll take you on your first real hunt.  You’re going to be magnificent, _ma belle cherie._  I can’t wait.”


	15. Once More, With Feeling (question, reprise)

**Once More, With Feeling (question, reprise)**

Allison would probably walk away from a motorcycle crash completely fine, but she’s got her arms wrapped tight around his waist anyway.  She leans into him with every single curve of the road.  Maybe Scott’s taking the turns a little more sharply than he needs to, but Allison doesn’t seem to mind.

It’s too sunny out, but it’s better when they reach tree cover.  Scott parks the bike half in a bush and tugs Allison towards the shadiest path he knows.  She squeezes his hand, fingers laced with his, and almost skips to keep up.

“See?” he says.  “Isn’t this better than school on your birthday?”

“This is better than school any day,” Allison laughs.  She leans into him, nudging his shoulder with her own.  Nobody comes up to this end of the forest, especially not in broad daylight.  Even the Hale pack usually only get this far into Beacon Hills territory on the full moon.  The woods are all theirs.

“I can’t believe you haven’t had a real birthday in a hundred years,” Scott says.  Allison grins at him.

“You just can’t believe I’m a hundred and twenty-three,” she says.

“You don’t look a day over ninety-six,” Scott promises her solemnly, and she laughs, and Scott smiles at her, and Derek can go jump in the lake because this is _perfect_.

Allison knows the woods even better than Scott does, and he’s been coming up here to collect some of the weirder herbs he sometimes needs for almost a year.  She can spot a fox trail even if it hasn’t left a single paw print in the mud, and she finds a tree that she swears has bats nesting in it, a hundred feet up way past Scott’s line of sight.  Scott picks her a yarrow flower because he can’t help himself.

“Good for healing,” he says.  And because he needs to be honest even if he’s teasing,  “And love spells.”

Allison raises her eyebrows even as she tucks the flower behind her ear.  “You cast love spells?”

“Do I need to?” Scott asks, hoping she gets it–he’d _never_ , he could never, not with magic, but hopefully he’s enough.

“No,” Allison says.  She leans in to kiss him before he can say anything else.

They go off-trail, down the deer paths, and Scott lets Allison lead him.  She hasn’t let go of his hand once.

“Can I ask you something?” he says.

“Hmm?  Sure, what?”  Scott probably shouldn’t, but he wants to know.

“I asked you a question, a while back, and I kind of got the feeling you didn’t give me the whole answer,” Scott says.  “I might be wrong, or if you don’t want to tell me that’s totally fine, but I was just wondering why you brought Derek to my house that night when you were hunting.”

Allison stops walking, but she doesn’t let go of his hand.  That’s a relief.  Scott squeezes it, hopefully comfortingly, when she doesn’t say anything for a minute.

“Honestly?” she says.  Her smile twists to the side wryly.  “I was mostly afraid of a war because I didn’t want my parents finding out.  I didn’t want them to know I did something as stupid as confusing a werewolf for a regular wolf.”  She shrugs.  “Stupid, huh?  A hundred and twenty-three and still worried about my parents?

“No, of course not,” Scott promises her instantly.  Allison might be a hundred and twenty-three, but that just means she’s been seventeen for a hundred and six years.  Of course she cares what her parents think.  He takes her free hand in his so they’re standing there, face to face, and she’ll know he means it.

“Lydia thinks it is,” Allison says.  Scott tugs her half a step closer.

“She’s wrong,” he says.  “It makes plenty of sense.  And I’m not Lydia.”

“I’m glad,” Allison says.


	16. Pastry Wars (dinner party, take three)

**Pastry Wars (dinner party, take three)**

“You’re not her _father_ ,” Lydia hisses.  “You’re her _sire_.  Whatever poor bastard of a human fathered her, you drained him dry.”  Chris is still smiling, or at least baring his teeth.  “You or Victoria.  What, you think I’d believe you just found her lying in a field somewhere?”

“You should think about stopping while you still have a throat,” Chris says, very pleasantly indeed, holding the tray of cookies like it’s likely to become some sort of weapon.  “Miss Martin.”

“Oh, I’m just getting started,” Lydia said.  “While you and Victoria are sitting here playing house like some kind of sad pathetic game, I’ll be teaching Allison how to be a real vampire.  With blood lust, instead of… _table runners_.”

She’s got the heavy cake stand by one hand, holding it delicately by its stem between two fingers.  Not a single person at the dinner table needs to eat, let alone appreciates the flavor of cake, but it’s decorated like a page out of Martha Stewart’s magazine.

“I don’t think you’re exactly the authority on what makes a vampire,” Chris says.

“No?”  Lydia tilts her head and looks at him, head to toe, the sensible boots, the button-down collared shirt.  His face doesn’t so much show the faint lines and wrinkles of age as the shadows and suggestions of where those wrinkles should be, if immortality and the blood of innocents hadn’t smoothed them away forever.  “And you are?”

“I’ve been following the code of our line for more than three hundred years,” he says, the poor idiot who thinks that being a vampire is something you need a _code_ for.  Gerard of the line of Silver has a lot of fucked-up influence to answer for, if Lydia cared enough to make him answer.  “I think I have a pretty good idea.”

“Hmmm,” Lydia says.  “Your body’s not young, Chris of the line of Silver.”  She says it almost casually, an offhand remark, but then she continues with it.  “You must have been…what, thirty when you died?  Forty?”  It depends on where, and when–hard labor and malnutrition show signs even three hundred years after death.  “What was your life like before?  Did you have a wife, before Victoria?  Children?  Real children, of your own body, not stolen from whatever hapless peasant happened to get in your way?”  He’s not smiling any more.  “How did they taste?”

She has his wrist in her grip, three inches from her face, almost before he’s realized he decided to strike.  Two cookies tip off the edge of his platter and roll to the floor.  The cake stand in Lydia’s other hand hasn’t even wobbled.  “Don’t,” Lydia says.

He tries to pull his arm away.  He can’t.  He could lift a car without a blink, but he can’t move Lydia’s hand an inch.

“Let.  Me.  Go.”  The others in the dining room can surely hear them, no matter how distracting Stiles is aiming to be.  That’s fine.  Allison won’t interfere, and Victoria doesn’t scare Lydia.  Besides, she needs to hear this too.

“You need to understand something,” Lydia says.  “Chris of the line of Silver.  I’m not your fledgeling.  I haven’t nursed blood from anybody in a very, very long time.”  Only a very old vampire could make themselves seem to be as young as Lydia.  Chris knows that perfectly well.  “Allison’s not your baby or your property to keep.  She’s fledged out.  And she’ll have better from the next six centuries than this sick parody of happy human families.”

“She’s my daughter,” Chris says levelly.  He’s brave, she’ll give him that.

“Do you want bride price for her?” Lydia asks sweetly.  “I dowered my last fledge with an entire island.”


	17. Quiver

**Quiver**

“Do you know who you want?” Lydia murmurs, half an inch from Allison’s ear as though she needs to be, even over the heavy dubstep beat from the DJ’s speakers.  Allison shivers.

Lydia has one arm around Stiles’ waist, still, her hand flat on the skin of his hip where his shirt doesn’t quite meet his pants.  He’s not dressed like high school loserdom tonight.  His muscles are tense, taut under her palm, ready to spring into action at a blink.  He’s hungry.

Lydia’s hungry.  Allison’s neck is right there, pale and still, no tiny flutter of a pulse underneath the pale skin.  By the end of the night she’ll be delicious-hot and flushed full of new blood.  Lydia promises to only devour her in ways that won’t leave Allison any more dead than before.

“This isn’t really my thing,” Allison admits, as though it wasn’t obvious from the way Lydia had to dress her in the first place.  She’s too tall for Lydia’s skirt; it rides up too high on her thighs.  Perfect.

“Then watch and learn,” Lydia says.  She makes sure the words ruffle the tiny hairs on the back of Allison’s neck, almost as if by accident, like the breaths she doesn’t need to breathe.  “Time to cut the herd.”

This is more satisfying with a partner, someone who can watch Lydia’s smoothness and be impressed, somebody to remember her later.  Having Allison here is even better.  Allison is very much a predator in her own right, and just a little bit prey.

Stiles slips away from her arm and into the crowd on the dance floor, just half a step out of sync with the so-called music and the throng of people swaying to it.  He’s not graceful, her boy, not even in death.  He doesn’t slip like a snake between bodies, so smooth they don’t even notice him there.  He prowls his hungry predator way through the crowd and all the smart little humans sway out of his way on pure instinct.

Lydia is the opposite pole to his magnet, the pretty face, smooth hip-swaying dance, the pull.  One tall, gawkish girl orbits out of Stiles’ path and towards Lydia, looking for safety in numbers from a danger she can’t even properly name.  Lydia grabs her hand and tugs her in for a moment, gliding her into the rhythm of the pounding beat.  Silly girl, and foolish human instincts.  Stiles wouldn’t take much more than blood.  The girl would wake up tomorrow morning regretting it less than if she kept glancing over at the blonde man with the charming smile, right over there.

Lydia spins the girl away and sways into the path of another, slides a hand along a hip here, a shoulder there.  The smiling blonde man who thinks he’s the predator here tonight touches the small of her back before Lydia slips to the side and tugs Allison back into her.

“Pick one,” she murmurs into Allison’s ear, her tongue just barely flicking against the lobe.  “Or all of them.  Anything you want.  We don’t have anywhere else to be.”  Allison shivers, finally, just as Lydia was going for.  “We’re here all night long.”


	18. Rencontre

**Rencontre**

Lydia had her pinned with casualness, leaning on one hand against the lockers at Allison’s back, her body angled between Allison and the rest of the hallway.  She wasn’t a strong vampire–at least, Allison could barely sense her, her presence almost as faint as a fledge, and she hadn’t flinched at the sun pouring through the hallway windows–but in two days she’d shown every sign of understanding the unspoken rules of high school and teenage interactions better than Allison could hope.  It was its own sort of power, when Allison had still never gotten over feeling out of date and out of step.

“Allison Argent,” Lydia said.  “Allison of the line of Silver, perhaps?”

Allison could straighten her shoulders for that, at least.  “Four steps removed from the matriarch,” she said.  “What’s your line?”

In America it was often Belladonna, Amanita, Viper, old European lines.  There were more Silvers back in the old country, but Allison’s mother had decided it was time to try their luck in the United States again, so here they were.  Silver was a powerful name.  Most vampires Allison met have heard of Gerard’s branch of the line already.

“Oh, you wouldn’t know it,” Lydia waved it off.  “I think it was Badbh?  I’m really not sure.  It’s not exactly the most notable line.”

“But you intend to change that?” Allison guessed.  The kind of intensity Lydia put out, Allison could pretty much feel the ambition pouring off her already.  Allison wished her luck, she guessed.  Lydia was already out without her sire, unless she was Stiles’ fledge, and Allison hadn’t gotten that impression.

“Hmmm,” Lydia said.  “I like you.  You can be my new best friend.  I’ll tell Stiles you’re coming out with us Friday night.”

“Friday night is family night,” Allison blurted out, a lie that even a vampire as young as Lydia would be able to read instantly, if she had a heartbeat to listen to.  Her parents wouldn’t object to having her tag along on their hunt on Friday, anyway.

“Saturday, then,” Lydia said.  “We can do that.”

“Saturday,” Allison echoed.  It should be fine, right?  “Sounds great.”

“We’ve got some good hunting grounds around here,” Lydia continued.  “The only really good place in Beacon Hills is the gay bar and Stiles made a terrible first impression so he always pouts when I go in on Ladies’ Night, but there’s a few good clubs up in the city, and San Francisco’s only a couple of hours away.  You can bleed them right there on the dance floor and in the dark, no one will even notice.”

Kate had taken Allison hunting like that before, in the dark, smoky, alcohol-soaked places where the humans were all almost as hungry for skin as she was for blood.  It wasn’t the sort of place she’d go with her parents.

“I don’t know how hungry I’ll be, after family night,” Allison said apologetically.  Lydia raised her eyebrows.

“I didn’t know fledges could even get full,” she said.  Allison gaped, not sure whether to be shocked, offended, or humiliated.

“I’m not a fledge,” she said.  She was a hundred and twenty-three years old.  She’d been an adult by any possible standard for at least twenty years.  It wasn’t much, but it mattered.

“Then stop acting like one,” Lydia said.  “Come out hunting with us.  Or fine, we can hang around town.  I can introduce you to all the boys on the lacrosse team.”  Allison could only guess how many of those boys had small, almost-invisible scars on their necks and unexplained gaps in their memories from nights spent partying with Lydia Martin.  “It’ll be fun.”

“Sure,” Allison agreed, for lack of any other excuse.  “Fun.”

“And maybe later we’ll have some different fun,” Lydia said.  She reached out, so casual and brazen that Allison didn’t even think to move, and tucked a lock of Allison’s hair behind her ear, fingertips just brushing the skin of Allison’s neck.  “There are so many things you can do with another vampire.”  Allison jerked back with a shiver.  Lydia raised an eyebrow.  “So jumpy, Allison.  It’s only high school.”


	19. Special Delivery (dinner party, take two)

**Special Delivery (Dinner Party, take 2)**

“Your home is very traditional,” Allison’s mom says.  She’d begged her parents to be something like nice tonight, or at least polite.  Stiles and Lydia are some of the first vampires of her own age-state she’s gotten to spend any time with at all as an adult.  Besides, Lydia is Stiles’ sire, Allison knows that for sure now, which means Lydia has to be a lot older, and a lot more powerful, than she lets on.  Allison doesn’t think it would be a very good idea to antagonize them.

‘Very traditional’ might be the closest thing to a compliment they’re going to get, and all things considered, Allison will take it.  It’s true, anyway–Lydia and Stiles found a slightly decrepit old ranch house on the very edge of the forest, and she’s pretty sure that half the furniture is older than she is.  Most of it’s probably only ever had one owner.  There’s the usual bewildering mix of centuries that Allison’s come to expect from a typical vampire household–somebody’s slim silver MacBook Pro sitting on an Elizabethan-style writing desk next to the ornate 18th century candelabra, the enormous big-screen TV in the corner, the intensely 1970’s leather lounge chair that Stiles claimed instantly and hasn’t moved from since.  And of course Lydia standing in the middle of it, dressed like she’s straight from a shopping trip in downtown LA.

Somehow it all works together a lot more harmoniously than Gerard’s chateau in Bourgogne, which always just seems dreary and overdone.  Allison shouldn’t be surprised.  It’s Lydia.

“Well I mean if you’re going to live for centuries, right?” Stiles says.

“You don’t think it’s a little too museum collection?” Lydia asks.  “I thought it needed a little more early Colonial influence, but it’s just so hard to find good replicas these days.”

Oh god, what is Lydia _doing_?  Allison manages to hold back her dismay and the bubble of almost-irrepressible laughter at her mother’s expression.  Never mind that Allison is totally sure everything in this room is original–the implication that Lydia would not only buy fake antiques to make herself look older, but then admit it, has both of Allison’s parents gamely fighting to keep their faces straight.

The sound of the doorbell has Allison praying for salvation.

“I’ll just get that,” Lydia says breezily.  “Stiles, entertain our guests.”

“So,” Stiles says, as they all turn to look at him.  “Follow any of those human sporting events?”

Lydia’s gone for less than two minutes, which feels like an eternity.  She sweeps back into the room with her hand around the arm of what can only be a pizza delivery boy.  Allison realizes what’s about to happen in a sudden wash of horror before anyone even opens their mouth.

“Well, part of dinner’s here, anyway,” Lydia says.  “I didn’t think one would be enough for all five of us, so there’s another pizza and somebody from the Thai takeout place on their way.  Does anybody particularly want to start, or should we wait until they’re all here?”

“What, exactly, is this?” Allison’s mom asks icily.  Allison closes her eyes.  Her dad at least would have been pretending not to know the answer to that question, but her mom…oh no.

“Dinner,” Lydia says, and when Allison dares to open her eyes to peek, she’s tilting her head in wide-eyed innocence.  “You didn’t want to go out.  I know it’s a little crass to order delivery, but we don’t have the dungeon space to store them for long, and it’s always so tricky to clean up after–”

“You expect us,” Allison’s mother says, “to drink from that?”

The delivery boy is tall, a little scraggly, with too-long hair that doesn’t look like it’s been washed in a couple of days.  He looks dazed, glazed over in a way that suggests Lydia spent most of those two minutes in the front hall hypnotizing him.  He’s definitely edible, and he’d probably taste fine–better than the roast beef and mashed potatoes Allison’s mom served last time.  But still.  This isn’t how it’s _done_.

“Is this some kind of joke?” Allison’s father asks.  Allison knows that tone.  It says that something had better be a joke here, fast.

“You said dinner party,” Lydia says.  “I thought we’d have something a little more filling than roast beef.  No?  Anybody?”  She glances around the room like a solicitous hostess offering an hors d’oeuvre that nobody wants.  “Stiles?”

“Nah, I don’t want to be the only one eating,” he says.  “Did we actually get a pizza, though?”  He holds up his hands in the face of the sudden glare of everybody in the room.  “Hey, I happen to like pizza sometimes.  It’s an acquired taste.”

“Thank you for getting your pizza from Sarpino’s,” the delivery guy mumbles.  “Thank you and have a nice night.”

“There’s a pizza,” Lydia says in exasperation.  “I was just trying to do something nice for all of us.”

“Roast beef would have been nice enough,” Allison’s father says.  He’s still got his dangerous smile on, but at least it’s not her mother.  Anything’s better than her mother.

“We don’t generally pretend to be things we’re not in this household,” Lydia says, and Allison feels a little chill down her spine.  Her parents have to have noticed–the way the vapid, new-fledged persona drops away, just for a few moments, Lydia standing there with all the presence and calm self-certainty of any really ancient vampire.  It sounds like a warning.  Like this whole evening has been some orchestrated warning.

And then it’s gone, back to Lydia pouting the exact same way she pouted at Mike O’Halloran in the lunch room last week.  “Wine and drinks, then?” she asks.

“Get rid of him, at least,” Stiles says, nodding at the delivery guy.  “And keep the pizza.”


	20. Tabiya

**Tabiya**

“I’m done with this, Peter,” Lydia says.  His games haven’t changed in centuries.  Lydia always ends up playing them exactly the same way.

“And yet you’re here,” he says.  “And here you’ve stayed for nearly two years.  You came to me this time, not the other way around.”

“I like it here,” Lydia says.  “I don’t feel like leaving yet.  And you’re not going to start a war to force my hand.”

“Some of the younger pups are baying for blood, you know,” Peter says.  “The Argent girl…what a shame.  Youth can be so rash, don’t you agree?”

“That’s not really a quality limited to the young,” Lydia says sweetly.

“There are so many kinds of youth,” Peter agrees.  “Care for some tea?”

She hasn’t gotten used to how old Peter looks.  He could be forty.  He _ages_.  It makes her skin crawl.  It bothers him too, especially when he sees her.  Lydia appreciates that.

“No blood?” she asks.  “I’ll pass, thanks.  I’m not staying long.  I was actually hoping to speak to your sister.”

“Talia’s out,” Peter says, with a smile just a little bit tighter, a little more forced.  He’s old enough that he should be better at controlling his face by now.  Then again, Lydia’s old enough to have figured out how to read him.

“Mmm.  That’s too bad.  How is your older sister these days?” Lydia asks, and doesn’t miss the tiny, microscopic twitch near the corner of Peter’s eye that no human could catch.  “Last I saw, she still looked as hale and hearty as ever.”

How it sticks in his gullet, how it must eat at him.  Werewolf elders live such a long time.  Talia’s nearly six hundred by now.  Still alpha.  Still, after all these years, alive.

Peter looks very nearly as old as Talia does.  He gets sick if he doesn’t drink blood and he flinches in the sun.  His wolf form is a twisted, monstrous beast, and no wolf of the Hale pack will ever have him for alpha while Talia lives.  Oh, he’s immune to silver, and in theory he’s vampire enough to outlive his sister eventually–but what use is that if she just _won’t die_?  Anyway, nobody knows for sure what becomes of a vampire werewolf over the very long term.  Nobody had ever been fool enough to try to make one before Peter blessed Hale.

“As well as ever,” Peter says.  “And likely to remain so, even in the event of a war.  Don’t underestimate us, Lydia.”

“Oh, I think I tend to estimate you exactly the right amount,” Lydia says.  “After all, who takes over if Talia dies?  One of her whelps?”  The Hale pack is low on elders.  Lydia doesn’t have to guess how much of that is Peter’s doing.  “Derek, that’s the one Allison caught, right?  Yeah, he seems like a great candidate.”

“Thank you for stopping by,” Peter says.  “I’ll be sure to tell Talia you called.”

Lydia leans into him, and does not flinch one millimeter from the smell–something once delicious, now gone slightly to grave-dirt rot.  She smiles.  “They’ll never have you, Peter,” she says.  “But maybe you’re so tired of it, you’d rather see the pack rip itself to pieces and die under our fangs, in Derek’s so-capable paws, than admit you’ll never be the alpha.”

“Why should I want to be alpha?” Peter says.  “I have everything I want right here.”

Mind games and a forest full of deer to rip into shreds.  Lydia wonders just how much influence Peter has over Talia’s pack.  He steps towards the front door

“Lovely as always to see you, Lydia,” he says.  “Have I mentioned how glad I am that you’re going by that again, by the way?  It’s always suited you well.”

 _Lydia_ means dust on the streets and clay jugs at the well, bright sunlight on rich purple cloth, goats and coins slipping from hand to hand in the marketplace–means, almost, in passing, home, or close enough to it.  Peter never saw it.  He never set foot anywhere near old Lydia’s earth.  He’s not half that old to begin with.  He thinks it scores him points, though, gives him power, to claim the right of judgment here.  He likes games like that.

Peter’s always liked games.  Lydia smiles at him.

“My heart beats for your approval,” she says, utterly sincere.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tabiya: a chess term for a set of opening moves that are repeated so regularly between players that they become rote.


	21. Unflinching (question, coda)

**Unflinching (Question, Coda)**

“Do you remember when we first met?” Scott asks.  It’s cooling down under the sheets, Allison can tell, even though the chill is distant for her.  Scott’s skin is sweat-damp and still warm against hers.

“You gave me a pen,” she remembers.  His chin is right there in front of her, so she kisses it.  The stubble he probably hasn’t even noticed he’s got since this morning tickles her lips.

“And then later that night, you came up here with Derek,” Scott says.

He has a hand in her hair, cradling her head, an arm around her back.  She could pull away.  She’s so much stronger than him.  Allison just closes her eyes.

“I did,” she says.  She knows him so well by now.  She knows where this is going.

“You didn’t have to,” Scott says.  “You could have left him–”

“Scott, stop,” Allison asks.  “It’s not what you want to think.”

“You saved him,” says Scott.  “You didn’t have to.”

“Because I was scared.”  Would her family even believe it, Allison admitting real fear to a human?  She keeps her eyes closed and tucks her head against his chest, willing him to believe her once and for all, willing him to ignore her and keep holding her anyway.  “Scared of a war and scared of my parents.  That was it.”

“You did save him, though,” Scott says.  “As soon as you realized he was a person–”

“No.”  Allison pulls three inches away, opens her eyes, she has to look at him for this.  Has to make him understand.  “Scott, I’m not a good person.  I’m not who you want me to be.”

“I just want you to be you,” Scott says.  “And I think–no, I know you’re better than you let yourself think.”

“I’m a murderer,” says Allison.  “I’ve killed people before and I’ll do it again.  You have to know that, Scott, or I can’t be–”

“I know,” Scott cuts her off.  “I know.  And I know you don’t have to.”

She shakes her head ruefully.  “It’s not that simple, Scott.”  He’s human.  He just doesn’t understand.

“Allison,” Scott says.  He strokes her hair back from her face, gentle, to tuck it behind her ear.  “I love you.  Really you.  You know that, right?”

“I don’t know how much that matters,” Allison says.  She loves him so much.  “I can’t be like you.”

“You don’t have to be,” Scott says.  “We’re meant to be together.  It’s fate.  And I don’t know how, but we’re going to stay together, one way or another.  I promise.”

Allison closes her eyes again, tucks her head forward.  His chest is so warm, his heartbeat is so loud.  “You don’t want to be like me,” she says.  “Not you.”

“I want to be with you,” Scott says, wrapping his arms more tightly around her again.  “It’ll be okay.  I promise.”


	22. Vampire Romance Novel

**Vampire Romance Novel**

He’s treated a lot of unusual patients who’ve come in through his bedroom window and his back door since the first time a werewolf, paw splintered full of mountain ash, trailed him home from the vet clinic, but Scott’s never knowingly met a vampire before.

It’s cascading down outside, pouring rain in a way you almost never see in Northern California, and Scott almost takes the first rattle of his window for thunder.  He looks up and around just in time to spot the face of the pretty new girl from his English class, pale against the darkness, as she bangs on the pane of glass again.

“Allison?”  She’s perched on the rain-slick porch roof like it’s something she does every day.

“You need to help him,” she says urgently.  “I was hunting and he surprised me in the rain, you need to help him.  That’s what you do, right?”

That’s when Scott glances to Allison’s right and notices the enormous wolf splayed out over the roof tiles, limp and unmoving.  “What happened to him?” he asks, bypassing all other questions for that one first.

“He fell,” Allison says.  “A really, really long way.”

There are cliffs in the forest outside of town, but the nearest ones are miles away.  “How did you…” Scott starts.  The wolf has to weigh at least two hundred pounds.

“And he might have gotten nicked by silver,” Allison adds, and that’s it, questions can wait.

“Get him inside,” Scott instructs, sliding straight into healer mode.  A werewolf with possible silver poisoning comes first.

Allison helps heave the wolf through the window, awkwardly, with Scott to help lower him down on the other side.  He’s rearranged his bedroom in subtle ways since it somehow started turning into the Beacon Hills Free Clinic For The Supernaturally Inclined, and the chest beneath the window makes a handy step.  He’s so glad his mom’s on night shift tonight.

The wolf looks familiar, but it’s hard to tell them apart with their fur on, and most of the Hale pack only comes by to check on the Beacon Hills end of their territory when they can’t avoid it.  Scott doesn’t even realize Allison’s still outside at first, until he glances up from getting the wolf laid out more comfortably on the carpet.

“Are you going to stay out there?” he asks.  “Come on in, it’s pouring.”

Allison slides through the window with inhuman grace.  Her clothes are soaked, clinging everywhere.  Scott makes himself look away.

“Um, I’ve got some shirts in the top drawer of the dresser, and the bathroom’s over there,” he says.  Injured werewolf.  Think about the pretty girl from English class later.  Injured werewolf.

There’s plenty to think about with the injured werewolf, anyway.  Half his bones are shattered; Scott tugs them straight and nudges them into place as best he can, and runs his hands through the wolf’s thick fur, looking for anywhere hot or swollen from silver.  He finds a slash along the wolf’s left front shoulder, too near the heart for comfort but shallow, already bled free of any silver dust.

“A poultice and some rest and he’ll heal fine,” Scott decides.  Agrimony, plantain, raw honey…where’s his willow bark twine?  He’s got his hands busy mixing and measuring things he would never have even recognized a year and a half ago, when he lets himself look back up at Allison.

His shirt is too big for her.  She doesn’t look quite human, she’s so pale and still in the reflected glow of Scott’s ultra-bright work lamp.  Scott’s gotten used to ‘not quite human’, mostly, but god.  Allison’s so pretty.  And she’s wearing his clothes.

“Thanks,” she says.  She’s still standing there by the bathroom door, not sitting down, even though the bed’s right there.  Scott swallows.

“You said you were hunting?” Scott remembers.  Now’s a better time for asking questions.  “What were you trying to hunt out in this?”

“Him,” Allison admits, biting her lip sheepishly.

“You were trying to hunt a werewolf?” Scott asks incredulously.  Never mind _how_ –usually people who’re trying to hunt other people don’t freak out and drag their victims to Scott’s window as soon as they almost win.

“Last time I was in California there were still real wolves,” she says.  “And it was hard to see through the rain, and the last three places we went didn’t have wolves or werewolves…” Allison wrings her hands.  “Please don’t tell my parents I couldn’t tell the difference until I was right there?”

“I won’t,” Scott promises.  “Doctor-patient confidentiality.”

“I’m old enough to feed myself without almost killing a werewolf and starting a war, I swear,” Allison sighs.  She runs a hand through her drenched hair.   _Last time I was in California…_

“I’ve seen you in sunlight,” Scott blurts out.  Allison’s smile is lopsided.

“Not for very long,” she says.  “I can stand it for a while.  I can reflect in mirrors and everything.”

Scott doesn’t have any blood in the house except his own.  Most patients he gets, a transfusion of human blood wouldn’t be much help.  But she’s so skinny in his sweatshirt.  She lost her prey and dragged a fully-grown werewolf all the way here.

“Do you need to eat?” he asks hesitantly.  It’s Allison’s turn to look startled.

“No, I’m fine,” she promises cautiously.  “Were you offering?”

“Um.”  Scott’s maybe not thinking quite as clearly as he could be, but she hasn’t tried to hurt him yet!  And she’s so pretty.  “Maybe?  If you really needed?”

“Scott, are you crazy?” Allison demands.  “I don’t know how you’ve been keeping up with this little clinic of yours without somebody killing you yet, but you can’t just offer that to a vampire.  Especially not a vampire who actually really needed it.”

“I haven’t really met any vampires before,” Scott says.

Allison stares.  “Is that a joke?” she asks.

“Not…that I know of?”  If vampires can handle sunlight like Allison can, then Scott might not know.  He supposes.

“Scott,” Allison says.  “You…you definitely know other vampires.”

“Are they at school?” he asks, mentally trying to roll down the list.  Greenburg, maybe?  “Who is it?”

“I can’t tell you that,” she says, almost too quickly.  Scott frowns.

“Are you afraid of them?”

Allison opens her mouth to say something, pauses, and closes it again.  “You’re really good, Scott,” she says, in an odd, quiet, warm sort of way.  “Thank you.  I’ll bring the clothes back.”

It’s almost a whirlwind, before Scott can say anything–Allison moving across the room faster than he can blink, the sudden gust of wind and splatter of rain through the open window, and Scott is left standing there.  Unexpectedly drenched, with the ghost of the feeling of Allison’s lips on his cheek.  And an unconscious werewolf on his bedroom floor.


	23. Welcome Wagon

**Welcome Wagon**

“So how about you tell us what you’re doing in Beacon Hills, and Boyd here doesn’t rip your spine out and leave you out on the lacrosse field for the sun.”  Stiles could tell without looking up that no humans were within–well, human-hearing-distance, anyway, god they were deaf.  He stood up unhurriedly and looked pointedly at the owner of the fist holding his brand new gym locker closed.

“I didn’t realize dogs could play on school sports teams,” he said, eyeing the two werewolves critically.  Ugh.  First he was back to pretending to be a freshman, and now _werewolves_ at this school?  They were like rats.  Always making noise, fur getting everywhere, gnawing holes in all your favorite foods, and they wouldn’t stop _breeding_.  “Do I have to come up with some really crass jokes about running track and field, or can we just assume they’re done and move on to you trying to threaten me?”

“We can do a little bit more than try,” the skinny, curly-haired one said.  So far the big one hadn’t said anything.  Stiles assumed he was Boyd.  “We don’t particularly like vampires in this town.”

“Okay, see, again, I feel like I should be saying something about marking your territory better, but it’s just too easy.”  Honestly, if Stiles had known Lydia’s randomly-selected small town was going to be full of werewolves, he’d have insisted on going somewhere else, but it wasn’t like they were going to leave now.  “Look, we’re not here to devour and enslave your entire little human population here.  You don’t get in our way, we’ll try to stay out of yours.”

The skinny one, simmering with unspent rage, looked about ready to hit something–the ground, if he actually tried punching Stiles, and with that Coach just on the other side of the wall in his office that could only end well–but probably-Boyd stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.  “Come on, Isaac,” he said, with one last warning look at Stiles, just to make it really obvious that they weren’t backing down for good.  “The alpha will want to know about this.”

“Oh great,” Stiles sighed.  “An alpha.”  That meant there was a whole pack of them somewhere around here.  Infested, seriously.  “What’s your alpha’s name?”

“Talia Hale,” Boyd said steadily.

Hale.   _Hale_.  Stiles was going to _fucking kill_ Lydia.


	24. X-rated

**X-rated**

Scott gasps, can’t help it.  Allison rocks against him, her thigh rubbing against the crotch of his jeans, her hands in his hair.  Her skin’s not cold any more,  and he finally got her bra clasp undone, so her boobs are soft up against him, soft in his hands, and her thigh muscles are hard between his legs, and Scott is seriously hard between his legs, and oh fuck he is going to have sex, probably, right now, with Allison.  Oh god yes.

“Are you okay with this?” he pulls back far enough to ask.  Allison’s hair is wild around her face.  She laughs, breathless.  Scott didn’t even know she could sound breathless.

“Yes, completely, of course,” she says.  “Are you okay with it?  With everything?”

Scott can’t even figure out why anyone ever wouldn’t be for a few moments, which he blames on lack of blood flow to his brain.  Then, “Yes,” he promises, runs his hands down Allison’s shoulders towards her elbows.  “Absolutely.”

“Okay,” Allison says, taking him at his word.  She dives back in for another kiss, and Scott surges up into it, his fingers tangling up in her hair, her fingers on the zipper of his pants…

He stops thinking much after that, too focused on touching and tasting and sliding his hands up under her skirt, struggling out of his jeans and peeling off her tights, the smell of her hair as Allison kisses from his collarbone up the side of his neck, wet and–

“Ow!”  Scott barely registers saying it, all reflex, before Allison is suddenly off him, on the other side of the bed, looking… “What just happened?”

“I’m sorry,” Allison says instantly.  “God, Scott, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to, I didn’t even think.”  Scott’s too dazed from the sex he’d been pretty sure was about to happen, and Allison is covering her mouth, a little hard to make out, but it doesn’t matter.  He pushes himself up on his elbows, off his back, to sit against the head of the bed.

“It’s okay,” Scott promises.  “Allison, it’s fine.  We don’t have to do anything.”  His erection, throbbing in protest, can just shut up.  It’s been happy enough with the shower for years.  “It’s okay.”  He reaches for her wrist, and then pulls back.  Maybe she doesn’t want to be touched at all?

“Oh my god, Scott.”  Allison closes her eyes and presses her face into her hands.  “I almost bit you.”

“Oh,” says Scott, processing.  “ _Oh_.”  The unexpected sharpness across his neck–he touches it automatically, checking for blood.  “It’s okay, you didn’t even break the skin, see?  I’m fine.”

“I’m sorry,” Allison says again helplessly.  She lowers her hands and looks at him again, though, which is a good step, and she doesn’t flinch or shy away when Scott reaches out to take her hand.

“It’s okay,” he says again.  “Maybe next time ask first?”

It’s not like Scott hasn’t thought about it.  His girlfriend’s a vampire.  He’s thought about it a lot.  They just probably also need to talk about it a lot, because half of what Scott knows is still guesswork and rumors, and he doesn’t know what Allison thinks, which is the most important part of all.

“God, Scott, you can’t just keep _offering_ that,” Allison sighs.  “I could kill you.”

“You won’t,” Scott says with absolute certainty.  He knows Allison.  She’s dangerous, or at least she’s capable of being dangerous, but that doesn’t mean she’d ever turn that capacity towards him.  He knows it for sure.

“I’ve never done this before,” Allison admits.  Scott’s eyes widen.

“Oh shit, I’m sorry, I just assumed…”  He’s been doing a good job of not thinking about anyone else, wondering how he measures up.  It never occurred to Scott to guess that in a hundred and twenty three years, someone as awesome as Allison would never have found someone worth dating, at least for a little while.  “We can go slower,” Scott promises.  “We don’t have to do anything you’re not comfortable with.”

“Not sex,” Allison says.  “I’ve had sex.  Maybe kind of a lot of it by human standards.”  Oh.  Scott doesn’t have any right to be jealous, but can he at least be a little insecure?  “It’s just always been about feeding.  You get somebody into bed so you can drink their blood.  It’s one of the easiest ways to do it.”

“That makes sense,” Scott agrees.  It’s kind of a screwed-up sense, and he doesn’t know what he thinks about all the implications, but he can understand it, at least.  Allison needs to eat.  He’s very firmly on the side of Allison getting to eat.  And she’s sitting there, looking so small, shoulders hunched and more or less hiding her bare chest behind her knees… “It’s okay,” he says.  “I don’t care what you’ve done.  Or who it was with,” he adds, and means it.

Allison squeezes his hand.  “You know you’re the only one, right?” she asks.  “The only person I’ve ever wanted to just be with.”

“I think you’re the only person I ever want to just be with,” Scott admits.  “Is that okay?”

Allison smiles, finally–not a big, beaming full grin, but it’s definitely a smile.  Scott scooches a little closer.  “I like that a lot, actually,” she says.  “I’m sorry I kind of killed the mood.”

Scott glances down at his lap, helpfully covered by a corner of the sheets.  “I’m pretty sure we can get it back,” he says with utmost honesty.  “Really very sure.  If you want to.  Which you don’t have to–”

She cuts him off with her lips on his, and not a hint of fangs at all.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic contains bits of blood, discussion of death and murder and assault, and implications sex involving minors (...sort of, possibly, on a technicality minors) in conjunction with the above.
> 
> Also the Argent family is creepy as fuck. That's just kinda a given.


End file.
